Steve Buttry, Dearly Departed Husband, Father and Grandfather. Former Director of Student Media, LSU's Manship School of Mass Communication

*Steve Buttry passed away on February 19, 2017. The content of this page will be maintained as an archive. Anyone seeking to follow-up with Steve’s professional work should contact the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication.*

Digital First journalism

Much of my work on this blog has focused on helping journalists and newsrooms transform from old print- or broadcast-oriented processes and thinking to digital-first journalism.

I did much of this work while I was an editor at Digital First Media. I left DFM in 2014 and don’t know what’s going to happen with the company. I think the advice remains sound for any journalist or newsroom pursuing a digital-first approach. Capitalized references to the company undoubtedly remain in many posts, but I offer them now as advice for journalists or newsrooms of any company.

Three series of blog posts summarize a lot of this my teaching and advice about achieving a digital-first transformation:

Explaining digital-first journalism

A series in 2011-12 explained several key aspects of digital-first journalism:

Culture change

My final work for Digital First Media was “Project Unbolt,” an effort to help newsrooms free themselves from their print culture and processes. That resulted in a series of blog posts, ending with an index to all the Project Unbolt posts.

I also discussed Project Unbolt and other culture change issues in 2014 posts for the INMA Culture Change blog:

1. Are their content really premium so the users will not go other places to see them free?
2. Second part of this question is:
Are they providing good options for users to pay:
a. Day pass
b. monthly subscription
c. yearly subscription
d. Pay per article (???)

I have seen first 3 modes of payment on several newspaper sites. But I have not come across the fourth one. As a user, it makes sense to pay for the article that is interesting.

Why is this option missing?

Is there a newspaper/magazine that is doing that? If not, why is it not done?

As my various paywall commentaries linked above say, I think paywalls are a losing proposition. So I’m not exactly the person to say why people aren’t considering a particular option. But I would venture that the difference between a day pass and a price per article would be negligible, so any site offering a day pass essentially is offering to let you buy a single article. But the other point is that the actual price per article would be so low that the cost of handling the transaction would give you negligible proceeds. iTunes charges 99 cents for a song you might play over and over. So you can’t reasonably charge that much for an article you would read just once. If a newspaper costs 50 cents and has 50 articles, isn’t the fair-market value of a single news story just a penny?